The Incest Diary Page 5

  * * *

  In high school there was a boy who wanted to suck my tongue. He was the son of the man who offered me one of his luxury cars if I let him fist-fuck me. It happened at his son’s sixteenth-birthday party. The man came over to me on his terrace, held my elbow, and whispered the offer in my ear. His son had shown me and other friends his father’s beautiful cars, old and new. Gray, dark green, dark blue, white, and black. Was the offer real? I don’t know, but it felt serious. I was intrigued by both the father and the son. I didn’t let the father fist-fuck me in exchange for a car. I felt desire, but I liked feeling pure even more. Purity with rare interruptions of deviousness. Purity in those days was doing very well in school. Purity was memorizing dates of historical significance. The Battle of Hastings. The year Machiavelli wrote The Prince. The birth of Johann Sebastian Bach. The year that Caravaggio painted The Seven Acts of Mercy.

  Deviousness in those days was letting that boy suck my tongue when I should have been in chemistry class.

  * * *

  Mrs. Martin came and spoke to our eleventh-grade health class. She came to talk about child abuse. She had been molested by an uncle. She came to talk about the abuse of power. She came to talk about harm caused to children. It is the only time I have ever fainted in my life. I fainted when she said the word incest. I felt dizzy and ill afterward. Mrs. Martin came over and kindly asked me if anything had ever happened to me. I told her that my piano teacher French-kissed me once. Which is true, but that was nothing. Just a disgusting man putting his tongue in my mouth. It tasted like peanut butter.

  Mrs. Martin told me that whatever happened wasn’t my fault. The health teacher told me I was excused to go home.

  That day, I was wearing a light blue floral sundress with buttons all the way up. It was the same dress that I wore years later on the night I was date-raped. Because I went to the emergency room, the hospital was required to take my clothing for DNA testing, should I choose to press charges. They told me they would keep my blue sundress and my flower bra for ten years in frozen storage. I asked them if I could get my clothes back after ten years, because I really liked that dress, and they said, unfortunately no, the evidence would be incinerated. A few years ago was the ten-year mark. I thought about my sundress and my bra. I imagined a city employee going through the drawers in frozen storage and pulling out my clothes and dropping them into an incinerator.

  * * *

  After my father left my mother, my mother never dated or remarried, but devoted herself more and more to steeplechasing. My father had girlfriends. I liked it that he had girlfriends, and I happened to like them, too. You might think I would be jealous, but I wasn’t. It was a relief. I especially liked Gloria. She was lovely. She was an economist. She gardened in a black cocktail dress and she drank a split of champagne every night. She told me that her favorite thing to eat for supper when she was by herself was crackers and cheese. One night when we ate hamburgers at her house, she used her best china and her damask napkins. I wanted her and my father to get married, which they spoke about at one point. But they didn’t. The last time I saw her was at my grandmother’s funeral when she left trace lipstick marks on both of my cheeks.

  * * *

  Going into my father’s room while he was taking a nap. He woke up from the sound of the door. He was sleepy. He raised the covers to invite me in. He wasn’t hard just then, but a few minutes later he was, after I put my hand on his penis. After I felt it grow and stiffen in my hands. Then he slipped it inside me. I was wet from it hardening in my hands. Wet from being under those covers where I felt so disgusted. After we both came, I got up and left.

  After I had an orgasm, I wanted to be as far away from him as I could. It made me want to disappear, to vanish into the air. I went to do my homework. I was writing a paper on the Renaissance.

  * * *

  André Breton wrote that Frida Kahlo’s paintings are like pretty ribbons tied on bombs. I love the paintings she did of her body being hurt. The ones where her skin is pierced by nails, arrows, thorns. Her body in bed, covered in blood and wounds. Snipping her own veins. She was wounded by a metal pole impaling her pelvis. But she was fierce and she survived. Her paintings made my body feel, they made my body scream.

  I made copies of her paintings as self-portraits when I was a teenager. I was a terrible painter, but I liked doing it. I made myself an easel and I looked at myself in the mirror. I painted my face and my hair. I painted my eyes and I painted my lips. I painted monkeys on my shoulders with soft black fur. I painted thorns piercing my neck just like she did. I painted tears. I painted a man in my forehead. The man in her forehead is Diego. The man in my forehead was my father. He liked my paintings. I painted the Prudential Tower in Boston impaling my pelvis. I hung my paintings on the wall of my new room at my father’s new house. He didn’t fuck me in that room. But he did fuck me in his bedroom, when I went in to him. He let me lead the way.

  * * *

  One ribbon was green and one was pink. He used a steak knife. I don’t know why he did any of this. He tied me to the chair and he spread my legs and put the knife inside and he cut. I was eight or nine years old. It was just my father and me alone in my parents’ bedroom. I was so afraid, and deep inside my fear I went soft. I don’t know how to explain it. I was so uncomfortable and so frightened that it made me light. I floated up out of that bedroom and house. I lived in the sky. I played in the clouds. My body was down in that house, but I was up in the sky. I was the sky. I was endless blue sky when I was tied to the chair when he put the knife inside and cut.

  * * *

  Inside the house with the leaky roof, it reeked of mold and must. It got into everything. My clothes, my hair stank of must. My father said he was sorry we lived there, and he would slip money into my schoolbag and tell me to buy something nice. Soon we would move, he said. My father cried a lot and said how sorry he was that he had failed in the marriage to my mother. His sadness and that disgusting house made me want to fuck him. I wanted to make him feel better. I felt bigger than him, like I could and should take care of him.

  I remember the house full of buckets in a rainstorm. The water splashed on the thick brown carpet. My father was on his foam mattress on the floor saying how sorry he was that we didn’t live in a better house. I got into bed with him. He felt better.

  The legacy of incest in my family is long. My father told me that he and his younger sister were molested by their grandfather Paul. My brother has Paul’s original wristwatch, which Louis Cartier himself made for the Brazilian aviator Santos-Dumont, who, for a brief while, was thought to be the first man to fly. I have two things from my great-grandfather Paul: a silver crucifix that says Semper Fidelis—the marines’ motto—and the legacy of the use of small children for sex.

  My father’s mother was raped by her father, the same Paul. She told me about it when she was dying. She wanted to talk. She had always kept things to herself, but now she was desperate to talk. She said that she got her cancer from keeping everything in. She told me not to worry about making mistakes in life, that everyone does, but don’t ever be overweight.

  She ate one strip of bacon with peaches for breakfast every morning. She always had two greyhounds—Roger and Betsy. The names stayed the same, but the dogs changed. She collected rocks. Everywhere she went—from Nebraska to the Seychelles—she took away a rock. Some were small and some were quite large. She confessed to me that she really loved Curtis, the man she met in her reading group. They read The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Virgil and Homer in their original Latin and Greek. My grandmother was close to Curtis’s wife. Curtis adored my grandmother. He and his wife had been friends of my grandparents, and they and other couples went on tours together. They went to Egypt and Tibet, to Sri Lanka, Namibia, Mexico, Japan. Curtis’s wife died, and at one point my grandfather was very occupied with his work, but my grandmother still went on the trips and so did Curtis. This went on for many years, my grandmother told
me. And sometimes it was complicated. He bought her jewelry that she wore only when she was away from her husband. And years into it, Curtis would beat the shit out of her. Leave her with emeralds at her throat and sapphires on her fingers in a battered pile at the bottom of the stairs.

  She told me she loved Curtis. She loved him and she forgave him. She hid their affair, but she couldn’t always explain away the marks. For a graceful, athletic woman it just didn’t make sense that she was always bumping into things with her face or accidentally falling down the stairs. She said she was heartbroken when she heard that Curtis had died rather unexpectedly. And the heartbreak was made worse by the fact that she had to mourn him in secret.

  I told her to eat yogurt. I told her it had a lot of calcium and she needed calcium. I wanted so badly for her to live. She told me that cancer was the best thing that ever happened to her. It made everything clear. All the fights she’d had with herself for so long were over. But I wanted her to live.

  One night, she lifted up her purple nightgown and showed me the scars on her flat chest. I rubbed her feet while she told me that she wasn’t going to say goodbye to me. She was going to say goodbye to everyone else who came to see her, but she wanted me to tell her that I loved her, and then to get up and walk out of her room and not look back.

  I was seventeen and applying to college. I told her I was going to spend a year abroad in Chile. “That’s nice,” she said. She suggested that I read up on Darwin.

  * * *

  It is rare for me to lose or misplace things. But every piece of jewelry I had from her, I lost. Most of her jewelry came from Curtis. Maybe my body thought about him every time I put on her delicate platinum choker. The gold in my ears. The pearls at my throat. All of it is gone. In college, I used to wear the choker all the time, and one morning I felt my neck and it was gone. Her pearls slipped off my neck, too, down my blouse, and into the snow on a walk through wintry Boston. Every time it happened, I thought she was telling me something.

  * * *

  I was angry when my father told me about watching her when he was young. My father would spy on his mother and watch her undress—he said he was excited by her beautiful and full breasts. He told me that he remembers a particular time when she had a white apron around her waist, but she was topless—no shirt and no bra. He was peeking at her from behind a door. He watched her breasts wobble when she moved. He said she was never more beautiful.

  * * *

  At her funeral, my father turned to me and said he would no longer be able to speak to me. He said that he didn’t know for how long, but I reminded him too much of her.

  I felt shocked, but I also felt relief. My grandmother—his mother—was the only decent thing binding us together. When his mother was alive, we spent so many long hours talking about her. I wanted to talk more to keep him from having sex with me. And now, with her gone, we had nothing to talk about. Which meant that sex was closer. The conversation stops, and it’s just us and our two bodies. And I felt the desire from him for what he really wanted from me. He wanted my body. In my darkness I wanted him, too, but in my heart I didn’t want him to ever touch me again.

  My brother and I can talk about our mother. We talk about what a terrible houseguest she is. She can’t help it. She is uncomfortable in houses that aren’t her own, and she injures herself, and knocks into things, and doesn’t want to do the activities we suggest doing. She sleeps in till noon, and wants to have breakfast when others are having lunch. It seems like every time she washes the dishes, she breaks a glass and cuts herself, which my brother is convinced is her way of getting out of doing any more dishes. She takes things out of the refrigerator and doesn’t put them back. She bends my silver teaspoons by digging into hard ice cream to have just one small taste. We talk about how thin she is, how we worry that she doesn’t eat enough. But we can’t even mention our father.

  * * *

  I remember the house my father lived in near a pond. I remember the softness of the air outside that house. For the first time, my brother and I had our own big bedrooms. I remember the light sky up above the heavy, wet air. This was one of the first times my father spoke to me again after my grandmother died. I was just about to leave for Chile. He was drinking white wine. There was a wood engraving of two figures and a moon and a tree over his bed that had belonged to my grandmother. There was a branch over the moon. The figures were plump and in silhouette. The man wore a hat, the woman a long dress. The green blanket on my father’s bed had a hole in it. I woke up in that bed. I don’t remember how or when I got there. I was cold. He was sipping his white wine, turning the pages of his book. I was naked, I had goose bumps. He pulled the green blanket over me. The hole passed over my body as the blanket was pulled up. He covered my head. I moved down so that I could look through the hole. The hole over my eye where I could peek out and see the white ceiling fan. I watched the still fan while something went in my pussy.

  That blanket with a hole, a hole to embarrass me, to mock me. A hole to excite me. A hole to make me a woman. Like an Orthodox matrimonial sheet. A hole only for something to go through it, all the rest is to be hidden. All of me was to be hidden. A confessional blanket. I’m talking through the hole in the blanket and all you can see is my mouth. I don’t remember exactly what happened that afternoon. But I feel something binding my wrists, and I can still smell the nauseating scent of his white wine. I hear the turning pages of his book. I remember the embarrassing and sexy feeling of my nipple popping out of the hole in the dark green blanket. And the engraved branch over the moon. With my eyes closed, I saw the dark branch cutting the bright moon in half.

  * * *

  Once, I went on a trip alone to visit colleges. I stayed with my cousin Martha in her dorm room at Harvard. I took the train to Providence one day and to Philadelphia another. I went into New York and interviewed at Columbia. That trip was not long after my grandmother had died.

  The fall before she died, my father took me to look at colleges. Princeton, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley. I was sixteen, with my hair up in a ponytail. I wore a denim skirt, denim jacket. A white V-neck shirt and simple black shoes. I remember holding my legs closed tightly as we drove. I remember being aware of my father’s eyes looking at my bare legs coming out of my skirt. I crossed my arms across my chest as he drove. I remember feeling very tense and trying not to be sexy. But it didn’t matter. It was just the two of us. I remember being at a small restaurant and he ordered a bottle of wine and snuck me some. It felt like being on a date. He leaned in to talk to me softly. I remember his blue eyes in the candlelight. He told me he’d never felt as close to anyone as he felt to me. That he didn’t like talking to anyone as much as me.

  Driving in the car. I don’t like it, because I didn’t like it, but I felt desire when he asked me to suck his cock. I did it and it excited me. Is it the same as Vietnam veterans getting excited when discussing the violence of war? I’m excited writing this, the way a man is excited talking about a battle.

  When we were alone, we were a couple. It didn’t matter how much I tried to be a daughter, I wasn’t. We shared a hotel room. We slept in separate beds as we should have, but I sucked my father’s cock that day while we drove. I felt his cock all the way down my throat. I swallowed his spurts of cum. He was wearing a green-and-white-checked shirt.

  He threatened to kill himself if I told anyone.

  * * *

  My mother’s mother told me I was a bad girl when I came home late one night in high school when she was visiting us. I wasn’t a bad girl. I had been studying at the library and then at my friend Jessica’s house.

  When it was just the two of us, I told her that my father raped me. She didn’t say anything. She was quiet for a minute or two before she asked me if I would like a tuna fish sandwich. That is the moment I felt like a very bad girl.

  After I graduated from high school, I won a scholarship to spend a year abroad. I went to Chile and lived there with a family. They had three small children
who told me I wore funny clothes and thought it was weird that I wanted to eat eggs for breakfast. I attended school in Spanish and French. I traveled as much as I could—from the Atacama Desert, where the Milky Way looked like a giant, pulsing umbilical cord, to the San Rafael Glacier, to Magdalena Island in the Strait of Magellan. I went to the Pomerape volcano with a few other international students, and it made me uncomfortable because it had the word rape in it. It was a word I did not like to ever say. But I also didn’t fear rape. I don’t know how to explain that disconnect. One day, I spent the afternoon with girls from my class after school, and one girl asked us all what our biggest fear was. Every single girl replied rape. When it got to me, I said without thinking about it, “Don’t worry, it’s not so bad, just pretend you like it so you can survive.” They all looked at me and no one said anything. It made them forget that I hadn’t said what my biggest fear was.

  I went to the skiing towns in the Andes where a few infamous Nazis still lived near the million acres of land that, legend had it, Hitler still legally owned. An old woman at a pharmacy where I went to buy sunscreen one day told me that after World War II ended, Hitler lived and died in Chile on an island named Friendship.

  I went to see the whales breeding in Puerto Madryn with my school class, and on the way back to Chile we stopped in Buenos Aires and saw the Casa Rosada. I traveled by bus. The buses are lovely—with reclining seats, and stewardesses who bring bread and butter and wine and pasta for dinner. Going south from the city you pass through grasslands with misty and soft air, the smeared landscape punctured by enormous cypress trees—majestic trees, holy trees. Polo horses and birds of prey.